MENDOCINO CO., 9/13/26 — A small gray-green bird with white eyes has been living since Aug. 31 in a thicket beside the creek at the mouth of Big River, singing a song that belongs about 1,500 miles east of here.
It’s a white-eyed vireo, a bird of thickets and wetlands from Texas to New England. Marty Freeland found it that morning near the Big River parking area in Mendocino Headlands State Park. The Mendocino Coast Audubon Society’s August sightings report says it appears to be only the second county record of the species. Another birder logged it in the same brush Friday afternoon.
A search of the California Bird Records Committee’s database turned up one earlier accepted Mendocino record: a bird at Usal Beach Campground that stayed from Aug. 22 to Sept. 20, 2020.
The white-eyed vireo runs 5 to 6 inches long, olive gray above and whitish below, with yellow spectacles around a pair of white irises that give it its name.
The National Audubon Society’s field guide calls it “a very rare stray in the West.” Its song is a fast, burry jumble, and the song, more than the bird, is what has given it away here. The guide also says the species will come up to examine and scold a birder who stands near the bushes and makes squeaking sounds. Birders filing checklists with eBird since Aug. 31 put it in dense brush next to the creek. That’s about 110 yards west of the restrooms and 35 to 65 feet north of the road.
It’s also molting.
Tim Bray, president of the Mendocino Coast Audubon Society, photographed and recorded the bird Sept. 4 and wrote in an eBird checklist that its wing coverts were still growing out. Peter Pyle, a records committee member who studies molt at the Institute for Bird Populations, read those photos as a bird hatched in 2025, Bray wrote. Four days later Matt Brady, an ornithologist who also sits on the committee, found the outer tail feathers about half grown. Because the tail was still molting, Brady wrote in his checklist, he expects the bird to linger “for at least a few more days.”
Freeland’s find drew company the same afternoon. Two birders located a flock of chestnut-backed chickadees, played a recording of mobbing calls and pulled the vireo in for a brief close look, one wrote on eBird. Matt Franks heard it Sept. 6, answering a recording of its own song.
Brady needed about 45 minutes to refind it Tuesday morning, in a breeze and among what his checklist calls surprisingly vicious mosquitoes. The bird came up only after he played a little of its song. Brady’s photograph, posted to iNaturalist on Wednesday, has been confirmed to species by two other reviewers there. Roger Adamson heard it Wednesday morning without seeing it. John Luther saw it Friday afternoon, mid-thicket, tail still half-grown.
White-eyed vireos have reached California often enough that the records committee stopped reviewing reports of them in January 2022. Its database holds 96 accepted records from 1969 through 2021, most from May and June. Fall birds are scarcer. Sixteen of the 96 arrived between August and October. Both Mendocino County birds belong to that smaller group. Both turned up in late August.
The only other white-eyed vireo reported anywhere in California in the past two weeks was at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego on Sept. 7, according to eBird.
The society’s August report also lists what it calls the first clear record of Townsend’s storm-petrels in Mendocino waters, a second county record of least storm-petrel and a third of black skimmer. Hawaiian petrels, Cook’s petrels and a short-tailed albatross were seen offshore the same month.
Mendocino Headlands State Park occupies 7,400 acres around the village on three sides, with the Big River wetlands added in 2002. The Usal bird stayed a month. This one was still in the same brush Friday, west of the restrooms, working on a tail it hasn’t finished growing.